Sunday, March 6, 2016

At the beginning of this year, a certain research article discussed the many special optimizations in the human hand that sets it apart from other ape hands in terms of manual dexterity and, by extension, tool use. Call it the science of the opposable thumb:

Interesting stuff. But don't base any of your studies though on their meticulous documentation and experiments. As you might guess from the watermark, the paper has been RETRACTEDdue to "inappropriate" (and apparently, offensive) language. Ming-Jin Liu et al used the C-word. Yes, the word "Creator" appeared not once but twice in the paper. P.Z. Myers and other intimidazi apparently bombarded PlosOne with protests against nasty so-called "intelligent design creationism" creeping in, and PlosOne finally noticed that the C-word had been carefully hidden in the front-page abstract. (Sneaky ID devils.)

The authors have since stated that the Chinese expression (perhaps Tian?) was improperly translated and should have been rendered as "Nature" for Western "ears." Bowing low before the angry Darwinian gods proved pointless though, and the publishers would not accept revising the "Creator" language to either "nature" or even "evolution". As Eugenie Scott and Barbara Forrest have taught us, if the eagle quacks like a duck, then it can't be an eagle, because it probably once was a duck and that makes it is just a duck pretending to be an eagle (or some such logical profundity), just like we are all really sarcopterygian fish, no matter how many millions of mutations and HGTs we may boast since our Tiktaalik phase. Someone call Barbara Forrest, for she may want to add a new chapter to her Trojan Herring book! Here's another attempt of unseemly religion to camouflage itself as Holy Science. Changing "Creator" to "Nature" won't atone for this unpardonable sin because it would be known that these edits changed it from being an ID article to "passing for" a Science article. But once a "creationist" text always a "creationist" text, and as the brave and wise luminary/logician Judge Jones III has opined, an ID article can't be a Science article.

You can still download the article but note that it bears the scarlet letters branded on each page. And yes, all this means the authors must be ... secular creationists!
Now, if only the thought police could scrub our Declaration of Independence of all this offensive language (as well as all public forums), we might finally be free from the freedom of expression.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

But then the kind of information that produces design of an algorithm or machine--or possibly a nanomachine made from amino acids--often requires insight, whereas the way that natural selection processes the information from the environment is much more like pedantry. *

And this classic gem, which could be said to Intuition, to Insight, to Revelation, to Wisdom herself, or to the Creator:

since feeling is firstwho pays any attention to the syntax of things will never fully kiss you *